It's been a busy week over here at JIG's secret flying doom fortress, and I wish I could tell you it's because we spent all week at a special company retreat painting each other's toe nails, eating strawberry cream pie, and talking about our favourite game developers. Unfortunately, that's not true. No, it wasn't all fun and games, we had to do actual work, too. And you know what I realised? Work is for suckers. Thus, this week's Link Dump Friday is about things that are also for suckers.
Pogo Swing! - Regular swingsets are for suckers. This launch game by Antony Lavalle proves it. Hurl yourself across the playground as far as you can in order to earn money for one sweet rocket-powered swingset. We used to do this sort of thing when I was a kid, but in general having the back of your head ricochet off the ground after you landed was generally met with less fistfulls of cash and more screeching for a teacher.
Collapse It - Safety codes are for suckers. Everyone knows explosives are so much more satisfying (and apparently profitable) if you use them in as irresponsible a manner as possible. Carefully place your explosives so they cause as much damage as possible to the people loitering beneath the perilous structures. Possibly you should feel bad about this, but crybabies don't get high scores.
Vectrix - Slow reflexes are for suckers. This fast-paced arcade shooter is low on context but high on crazy-fast action. Fly down a corridor that looks like a combination of Lawnmower Man and early Sonic bonus levels, snatching multipliers and shooting down the villainous red squares to last as long as you can. It takes a while to get the hang of it, but in no time you'll be haphazardly careening off of things and going down in flames like a pro!
Conway's Inferno - Brains are for suckers. A little unnatural selection should take care of that. This strange little twist on Conway's Game of Life, created in just three days for the Global Game Jam, is just the ticket for anyone who thinks what the world needs a bit more of are zombies. And UFOs. Zombie UFOs... ? Yeah, that sounds about right.
EketeKonnect - Simple puzzles are for suckers. Look. Okay. You guys are smart. I get that. You don't need me to try to explain this for you because it's just going to crack the door open and shine a light on my ignorance about it. ... really? *sigh* Okay. This logic puzzle is about drawing lines. Your goal is to connect the numbered, shaded boxes on a grid by drawing lines that match a particular criteria. It's simple, but tricky, and I am not very good at it. If you need me, I'll be over here, wearing the cone of shame.
I made a level in EketeKonnect
:D
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Pogo Swing was AWESOME. Especially the ending!
Okay, Pogo Swing was kind of repetitive and lost its novelty pretty quickly (which is easy to do in launch games), but that ending was worth it.
Level 15 of EketeKonnect was pretty cool. It's one of only three levels there I've beaten.
Conway's Inferno was brilliant except it seems to run on something like 3 frames per second (might be a design choice as it wasn't unbearable and added to the clunkyness of the world) but the pain of having got to about10 levels in and accidentally closing the browser then discovering my progress had gone was a bit too much to take. But it was written in three days and for the time I spent playing it it was a thoroughly enjoyable game, would love to see more and play more (but with a save feature!!)
Collapse it, is for my taste a little too uncomic like. Dunno why. I had no problems playing castle siege and the such. Strangly. But this one raises too much associations to wikileaks "colleteral murder", putting death from above just for the fun of it.
Aha! Re:- frame rate - my computer's fault. Closed all fifteen apllications running and it's now superfast!
Got -4000 and somthing in pogo swing and can't be bothered to get the money back.
omg EtekeKonnect is HARD. i want to solve them, it goads me on, but sadly i cannot.
Besides the fact that Conway's Inferno is a cellular automaton it really has nothing to do with Conway's game of life.
"Hey I bet we could earn money by jumping really far!"
"...and how do you explain that?"
"Because its a flash game!!" XD
OK, EtekeKonnect is a good idea in theory, but the execution is a little lacking. My main problem: multiple solutions. Never a good thing in puzzle games of this format.
"Besides the fact that Conway's Inferno is a cellular automaton it really has nothing to do with Conway's game of life."
Cellular Automaton? Check.
Life? No, DEATH!
Thus, "strange little twist."
What are the first two medals in Pogo Swing?
Curse you... EketeKonnect isn't helping my procrastination at all.
This is definitely twisting my brain in ways that it sadly hasn't been twisted very often. I love it. And the fact that you have to try the paths first and keep on adjusting as you go. Lots of sit-back-and-scratch-your-chin thinking involved, while requiring you to take pot-shots with those long ones.
That and the fact that (or is it just me?) almost right away the levels become too complex just to breeze right through. It's not a Flash arcade game, but a puzzle game. Like something from GAMES Magazine.
I found a glitch in Pogo Swing. I accidentally upgraded my swing frame one more than I wanted to, and I decided fine whatever, I wonder what the third one looked like. So I clicked the third "upgrade bullet" and I saw the third rendition of the swing in the background. However, it also subtracted the amount it cost from my total. I didn't notice. I continued clicking random things to see what would change, all the while it was subtracting all these amounts form my score until I was so in debt that I gave up on trying to reach the goal, because I would have had to climb out of debt to buy anything new, and that would have taken me forever. I don't think it should let you go below $0.
Chipmunk, the first two medals are for
swinging 50 times and 100 times, respectively.
Sorry, no, that's nonsense, it's the opposite of that.
Completing the game in 50 swings or less;
Completing the games in 25 swings or less.
EketeKonnect FTW!!!
But there should be an option to backstep, or to "lock" selected lines. As now, one has to re-draw things a bit too often.
And, are the levels really sorted by difficulty?
Egads, EketeConnect is HARD. The good kind, that makes me WANT to figure it out. Just. Hard. Cones of shame all round. I'm... three or four levels in and they were hard-won.
As littlefish says, I too am frustrated by lack of undo feature, or ability to lock lines I'm surer about. The controls are... not elegant. But the puzzles are fiendish!
EketeKonnect is excellent. An intermediate level or two would have been nice to get into it, but now that I've knocked out a few levels, I'm really enjoying it.
BTW, I've solved almost half of the levels in EketeKonnect (in no particular order). I'm happy to give hints where anybody needs them.
i made a level on ekete konnect, its impossibly hard
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